My Final

For my final, I decided to do option #2. I have researched all of the different problems surrounding water and sanitation throughout Africa, and although many of the needs are unique to the different geographical regions, many of them are general solutions that could assist Africa as whole.

For example, north Africa is naturally a water-scarce region yet much of their source of revenue relies on agriculture and farming. A way to fix this problem could be introducing some low-cost technologies like treadles for the crops, or simply cultivating crops that are more "water-efficient" meaning that they require less water and can actually feed more people.

Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers from water-scarcity, and as a result of this women and young children walk up to 3 or 4 hours a day just to get clean water! To put this into perspective, around 40 billion hours are lost annually just from hauling water! A possible solution for this problem unites education and water and sanitation...by placing Playpumps (refer to my last blog) near schools, kids would have a place to play and a source of water thus enabling the schools to have better sanitation and a safer environment.

Overall, the main problem in Africa seems to be that any kind of effort being made to provide clean water is being handled as an isolated issue by the government. Clean water and sanitation are both very local and individually-based issues, so the government trying to handle this issue without any communication with smaller communities isn't the most efficient technique. In addition to this, in case any one hasn't noticed, it seems like the majority of African problems are all related to one another, so trying to tackle this issue as a separate entity doesn't make a lot of sense. Ideas like the Playpump benefit children and also address multiple issues like water sanitation and education.

There are a near-infinite amount of websites that accept donations, and even just being aware of these issues helps to make a difference.

Ideas For My Final...

I have decided to work on option #2 for my final project. There are alot of water sanitation organizations online and, although they are all working towards the same task, they are working in different locations and utlizing different ideas to reach their goal. One really interesting site that I found uses the "playpump system", which is a sustainable water pump powered by playing children! They are installing the playpump near schools so it can provide clean water and a place to play (its like a merry-go-round).
Another site I found is the Samburu Project. The Samburu people are a nomadic tribe in Kenya, and theyre biggest problem comes from geography...they have no clean water. The Samburu Project decided a while ago to create fundraisers and donations so reach their goal of providing 25 wells to Samburu (around $12500 for each well) and they have already provided 22!! Each of these wells can help hydrate up to 2000 people...so needless to say its making a huge impact in the lives of these people!
Water for People is another organization, only they contibute to water sanitation on global level (including Africa), becasue this site is so large they actually have different people all over the world creating online journals of the impact theyre making on behalf on Water for People. They have a person (Sarah) in Uganda and Malawi recounting her experiences everyday, its a really great idea to have them making personal entries about their experiences there. Since its such a large organization, it can be easy to be a little skeptical or even overwhelmed, so the personal aspect of having these poeple reporting helps to make it a little less overwhelming.
This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as my resources are concerned, so obviously there are a lot of different and great ideas regarding this problem! I still have to map out what my own ideas will be in an attempt to make some sort of impact, but with all of these sites and ways to donate and get involved, Im sure I wont have a problem coming up with something!

Africa Aid...Water

After just googling "organizations for Africa" I found a ton of differnt groups, foundations and organizations all dedicated to helping Africa in a multitude of ways. The one I chose is called Africa Aid, they cover a few different issues in contemporary Africa (economy, education and water just to name some of them). Since I just researched the problem of deforestation in Africa and discovered that this problem directly links to the problem of clean water, I decided to research what Africa Aid is doing to help with water sanitation. Africa Aid has created (through fundraising) an Assessment and Action Team in Ghana, dedicated to researching and ultimately creating a clean water source in Buduburam (an area of Ghana). They are working with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and have gathered water sample data to take to San Diego (which Im assuming is the headquarters for their research team) and hopefully create a water filtration system for use with existing boreholes in the Buduburam. Its a really user-friendly site and you can make donations to Africa Aid to help with their funding for research and development of their plans. They also have little facts on the sides of all of their pages on the site to help give a sense of the vastness of Africa and the continent's poverty (one that I saw was that the world population is 6 billion...Africa's population is 780,000,000 and 27% of the entire world's population without clean water lives on the continent of Africa!!) Just from the small amount of research I did to create this blog, it opened my eyes to all of the different sites and foundations dedicated to JUST clean water! Theres so much to do and it awesome realize that the internet makes it that much more possible to make a difference in someone's life who is on the other side of the world, I'll probably end up doing more research about this topic and hopefully formulating my final around ways to help this problem.

Child Soldiers

It is believed that there are more than 120,000 children (under 18) participating in military armed conflicts just in Africa today, some of the children as young as 7 years old. I cannot believe such a huge number...i know that there are milions and millions of people in just one country of Africa, but still, considering these kids are equivalent to US 2nd, 3rd or 4th graders 120,000 is an overwhelming amount...in my opinion 1 would be too many. And becasue these children are obviously emotionally/pyschologically immature as well as physically, they are willing to take greater risks...this is probably becasue the kids think that they are part of an elaborate game and dont really realize the harsh consequence of their actions. These children can begin as porters (carrying food or ammunition) or messengers, others as spies. It bad enough that these kids have to be subjected to this lifestyle but to use them as spies really demonstrates the extremity of their exploitation, obviously they are much less likely to be suspected on enemy territory than a grown soldier, so the men use this to their adavntage and utilize every aspect of these children, including the preconcieved notion of their innocence...completely disgusting.

I also though that it was very interesting that girl children are also used as soldiers, which we werent really exposed to in Johnny Mad Dog. In Liberia, about 1% of child soldiers were girls. However, girls play other roles as well: girlfriends or wives of rebel leaders, through researching I found out that they refer to themselves as "wartime women". Many times girls are forced to become girlfriends of rebel soldiers, and if they refuse they are simply killed; however if they do become a part of the group the risk for sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies are enormous.

Johnny Mad Dog

I had mixed emotions about Johnny Mad Dog...although I found the book entertaining I never once stopped thinking that this kind of stuff happens all the time in Africa which made it frustrating and difficult to read at times. I was watching Tropic Thunder not too long ago and in the movie, the characters have a run in with a group of drug smugglers and the leader of them all is a homocidal child...although the movie mocks the idea of "child soldiers" or more specifically drug lords and poverty, I couldn't help but be reminded of the harsh reality of this lifestyle that was more truthfully depicted in Mad Dog. In a way it almost seems comical reflecting back on it now, because the whole idea seems completely absurd, however for the children in Johnny Mad Dog this way of life is very real (and very, very gruesome) and what these children fail to realize is that they are really nothing more than just brain washed little machines that have been programmed to lie, cheat, steal and kill. One aspect of the book that I did appreciate was Laokole's character, she seemed to provide some kind of humanity and relateable quality that made me realize the realness and effect of all of the destruction caused by Mad Dog and the other soldiers in the text. While the young boys glorify and glamorize killing (through strange yet eerie Western pop culture nicknames and clothing) and the power that coincides with it, she seemed to represent the real life consequences of all of this needless death and destruction. One part that really made me realize the stark contrast between Laokole and Mad dog's lives was when the book describes Laokole pushing her father on a wheelbarrow and trying to find her brother...I cannot imagine the immense frustration and hopelessness of her situation, and to make matters worse it seems like all of the child soldiers (the same age as her) have been completely transformed into killing machines. Whats even worse is that these kids justify their actions by mistaking their heartless savagery with the lifestyle of "real soldiers", their minds have been so distorted that they cant even distinguish wrong and right because all of their horrible behavior has been associated with masculinity and adulthood...things that any child naturally aspires for.

The Problem of Deforestation in Africa

As I'm sure many people already now, rain forests do more than just act as a home for exotic birds and cute monkeys...they operate as a sort of "lung" for the environment, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the quality and flow of water (clean water is another big problem in Africa...kind of a vicious cycle situation).

The deforestation occurring in Africa is adding to a world wide air pollution problem. However the thing that makes this such a complicated issue is that because Africa is largely a suffering continent, many of the developing countries use wood fuel for heating and cooking (which are basic necessities to pretty much everyone).

Just to give an idea of how integral wood fuel is to African lives, I have some statistics... around 90% of the entire population of the continent relies on wood fuel for cooking, that's A LOT of wood! Its no wonder then, that even though forests cover about 22 % of the region, but they are disappearing faster than anywhere else in the developing world. It seems like, as always, Africa is in a complex situation...whereas other countries use the products of deforestation for logging or commercial use, the African people rely on the destruction of their rainforests just to survive.

Waiting for an Angel

Wow! I really liked this book, and usually I'm not a big fan of novels jumping around in time but this one was a lot easier to follow than Ancestor Stones. I actually appreciated the jumping around by the second half of the book because anything that was mentioned I felt like I knew because of the past history that was already provided.
I thought it was nice to see that for once the guard (or any kind of authority figure for that matter) was willing to help Lomba, but once he started his writing he had to do so secretly and half of the time didn't even know the right date...that aspect of prison is oddly what I found to be the most terrifying. Lomba seems to be completely isolated and detached from the rest of the world, which is why its so hard to read about him in prison within the first portion of the book. The further Waiting for An Angel develops the more I keep wishing for a different outcome than the one I already know.
One part that I found to be especially interesting was during the fortune teller scene. It was strange that the fortune teller knew that prison was in his future, but when asked about death the fortune teller only replies with "A wise man is always ready for death. Assume it will come tomorrow, or in the next minute." Parts of the book like this made me feel like Habila provided all around great life lessons and advice through his work, but when looking at the big picture I realize that what made this book feel like such a personal read was because it deals with the social issues of the time by exploring the life of one individual. I like that the novel was trying to accomplish too much, focusing on just a single person's experience made me understand the gravity of the situation a little better.